


Recovering

by halotolerant



Category: The Professionals
Genre: Angst, Futurefic, Injury, M/M, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-29
Updated: 2010-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:33:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 2009. Ray is there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recovering

**Author's Note:**

> Drayce prompted from the 'Trope Challenge': 'We're going to die anyway...' and I turned that over in my head and came up with this thing. [](http://elfwhistletree.livejournal.com/profile)[**elfwhistletree**](http://elfwhistletree.livejournal.com/)'s beta skillz have once again delivered you from my grasp of grammar and numerous other things.

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[challenges](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/challenges), [fiction](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/fiction), [genre: angst](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/genre:%20angst), [genre: older lads](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/genre:%20older%20lads), [genre: slash](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/genre:%20slash), [pairing: bodie/doyle](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/pairing:%20bodie/doyle), [rating: teen](http://community.livejournal.com/teaandswissroll/tag/rating:%20teen)  
  
---|---  
  
_ **Recovering (Teen) by halotolerant** _

This is, can you believe it, [](http://draycevixen.livejournal.com/profile)[**draycevixen**](http://draycevixen.livejournal.com/)'s birthday present, from... well, it didn't quite take long enough to get to her next birthday but we were heading there! Sorry for the delay, honey, and Happy Birthday 'n' a bit ♥

**Title: **Recovering   
**Author:** halotolerant   
**Proslib/Circuit: **Yes   
**Pairing:** Bodie/Doyle   
**Rating:** Teen   
**Warnings:** Nothing striking: Loss. Hospitals.   
**Words:** ~5,500   
**Notes: **Drayce prompted from the 'Trope Challenge': 'We're going to die anyway...' and I turned that over in my head and came up with this thing. [](http://elfwhistletree.livejournal.com/profile)[**elfwhistletree**](http://elfwhistletree.livejournal.com/)'s beta skillz have once again delivered you from my grasp of grammar and numerous other things.   
**Summary:** It's 2009. Ray is there.

 

Ray.

Ray was there.

The strange, painful, shapeless darkness had ended, and as Bodie had opened his eyes for the first time since it began that he would be able to remember afterwards, he saw that Ray was there.

Bodie didn’t question it, didn’t wonder about anything; everything was fuzzed around the edges as though reality had gathered dust whilst he’d been away from it. Wincing in pain, he squinted into the light, both things pricking tears from his eyes until the blur slid and slipped and the light was all he could really identify.

The moisture ran down the back of his throat and he coughed; his mouth was as dry as cardboard and sand and felt as though it ought to be creaking, and the cough swelled out his headache like a pump to a balloon

He moved his hands, or tried to - there were things on them, things holding them back and other things, heavy and light and smooth and soft; unidentifiable. The muscles felt strange; too large or too small or something wrong, anyway.   
 

And then the blast of sensations dimmed and simplified as he felt a cool hand slip into one of his own, the other covering over it, squeezing just a little tighter than might have been called gentle.

Bodie blinked and tried to concentrate, making himself focus on the face leaning towards him, on all the pieces of it that made recognition easy, though changes had happened since he’d last seen it. Out of the light, the sharp, blue daylight, a face close and sad and lined and lips opening, eyes closing; the expression this man had always worn when he was embarrassed to speak the words he wanted to say.

“Ray,” Bodie said, when he could, when his mouth would move.

Relief, the calm pleasure of relieved anxiety, brighter and warmer than morphine, crept across his body. He sank back into the pillows that seemed to be behind him and let his eyes close again, keeping hold of the hand that held his own as firmly as he could.

It gripped back, anchoring him, and Bodie didn’t question it for a moment.

\- - -

There was a beginning, once.

In what must logically have been the next few days - which he experienced in fragmented, opiate-laced hours of unfixable events - he began to dream about it; memories he’d turned away from years ago running themselves fresh and Technicolor.

Not that there are beginnings. Nothing ever began but everything, all at once. That book he’d had in Sunday school, with coloured pictures pasted on thick cardboard – a man and a woman, in a garden and then running away from a storm cloud and lightning. _They were ashamed of their nakedness_; that was how the verse put it, when you got older and heard more of the story. The first ever two people to love each other, and they were awkward and full of guilt.

And not exactly that many years ago but enough, enough to feel like someone else’s life, Bodie had once lain on the floor of an abandoned mansion house, feeling far too warm, having got into his sleeping bag fully clothed for reasons he was not entirely keen to analyse, waiting for the Middle Eastern summit and the possibility of death, watching Ray not undressing either and hearing that verse in his head.

That was a beginning.

A car starts rolling into disaster when you slip the handbrake; of course, first you need a car, and the road and the gravity and all of it, but the handbrake slipping, that’s pretty crucial.

In the night, waiting, breathing. Watching each other.

Ray turning over and over, finally sitting up, hard to see in the darkness; a suggestion of the shadow around his eyes and a glint deep within that, but Bodie had known exactly what his face must look like.

“We might die, Bodie.”

Watching each other.

“If I die, Bodie, I don’t want not to have...”

What Bodie had felt had been more like fear than anything: “Shut up. Don’t."

"But you know what I mean.

Bodie was even warmer now, a wave of heat and adrenaline moving across him, making his chest tight and ripping deeper breaths out of him; he clenched the sleeping bag and felt the sweat on his palms.

It was dark. He turned his face to the wall. He could always tell himself he didn’t remember this.

“I know what you mean. Leave it.”

“You _do_ know...” It was the relief, the strange mixture of relief, surprise and joy in Ray’s voice that did it. Bodie had never considered that Ray might be uncertain, might be struggling to see something that Bodie considered an obvious and bluntly inconvenient fact, whatever finer, fragile truths might exist beneath that.

He had turned over – it was instinct, he wanted to see the expression that went with that tone, he needed to, and he didn’t think that it was dark any more than he thought that the act was just incredibly stupid.

There was a moment of stillness, both of them stuck in the sleeping bags.

“No,” Ray’s voice was low, rough with anger. “No. You don’t have a fucking clue.”

Bodie moved first, in the end. And then there was the violence of it all, of Ray suddenly close and intent and purposeful, catching and holding him and biting him more than anything. Clinging – you called women clinging when they simpered and depended and wouldn’t leave you be. What a thing it was, to realise you didn’t want to - couldn’t - let go. Want. All want, all thick intense feeling the naming of which hadn’t seemed to matter. Life not death; the pulse in Ray’s neck under Bodie’s tongue, the heat and taste of each other, the trickle of sweat and the breathing, over and over and higher and more ragged until the pinnacle, until there was nothing but the moment and the breaking.

And so the handbrake slipped – call it a beginning, although it was already far past being avoidable.

And you’d call the crash the end. You’d look at the wreckage and say it was done. But that’s never the case either, because the smoke is there and the car isn’t and that’s a consequence, that’s ripples still moving out.

\- - -

Bodie sat up before he was awake, gasping, thoughts still twisting, speaking before he was aware of it.

A voice came back. “No, love, it’s night time now.”

The woman – who was lifting a cardboard cup of small white pills to his hands and had a little watch dangling vertiginously from the curve of her breast – smiled at him without particular effort and reached across him to retrieve the water.

Bodie wasn’t quite sure what he’d said to her, and waited.

“He’ll be back tomorrow, probably. He’s been coming to see you every day. Open your mouth. Lift your tongue.”

She peered into his face for a second, then nodded and scribbled something on a chart. “Keep drinking, alright? We need you to keep drinking the water, and then this bag can come down.”

She bustled around him for a few seconds more. She smelt of a perfume Bodie didn’t recognise, but it was a sweet, light contrast to every other odour in the room and he breathed it in gratefully.

“This is going to sound stupid,” he tried, casually. “But I can’t seem to remember what happened to me.”

The smile she turned on him had a hint of strain. “After that bump on the head you’ve been very poorly, but you’re doing ever so well now. We were feeding you with a tube last week and now look at you! You’re to have a breakfast tomorrow and see how you do with it. And the Physio is planning to get you up and into a chair too. We’ll have you running away before we know it! Now, you make sure and rest, OK?”

And, pushing through the door, she was gone.

Looking at the pockmarked boards of the ceiling, Bodie tried to reach out to the edges of thoughts that seemed important.

But the fuzzy warmth was creeping into his mind again and things went very still and then he was asleep once more.

\- - -

During the best times, the best times had been the afternoons. The long sunny days when they’d sit out on the balcony and read the paper and drink beer from the bottle, and crawl inside and pull the thin brown curtains closed and lay out on the excuse for a sofa that Bodie had had that year.

He’d got used to the way Ray’s skin smelt, up close, and the way he kissed and how to change it. The sound he made when he was happy and the sound he made when he was aroused as all hell and what the difference was and when that was important. And he felt – for all he tried not to know that he did - as though as long as it could be the two of them, close, not looking beyond or behind, just a nest in the knackered upholstery in the still of the flat, the scent of beer at the edge of everything, there was nothing wrong in the world.

One night, he’d dreamed of taking Ray out dancing. Of being in a club, everyone swaying, and pulling Ray close and then closer, letting themselves get worked up – sweat-damp denim and mouths tasting of vodka - showing off the way you did when you wanted everyone to know that you were getting some that evening.

And then Ray.

Ray. Cutting little salsa moves out with his hips when he cooked pasta, laughing over the strip cartoons in the paper, sticking out his lower lip with studied petulance when breakfast was perforce too early. Sliding in and out of ridiculously tiny jeans that started to be found ever more strewn around Bodie’s furniture. Walking next to him, long, measured, fairly silent strolls by the Hampstead Heath bathing ponds, the Thames Embankment, Nunhead Cemetery; anywhere that was fresh – they’d had such a yearning for cool air that summer, and perhaps that was what you did, when you became two people together, you tried to get back to that garden.

\- - -

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” Bodie said.

All morning there had been one taste in his mouth, this one intense recollection that he couldn’t place and couldn’t shift. He’d had an idea of a shiny table, a shiny metallic table in a cafe and waiting for a phone call; coffee in a paper cup, because they did that now.

“Tuna nicoise,” Ray had said on entering the room a minute earlier, carrying a plastic bag with a maroon star on it and with his big black overcoat coat all covered in snow; he slung it over the back of a scoop-back visitor’s chair with ease of practise.

Bodie held on to the edges of his mattress, waiting. The dreams could be oddly vivid at times – this was probably now, but it might also not be.

“Tuna nicoise wrap,” Ray had clarified, setting the bag on the chipped laminate table that extended across Bodie’s bed. He had been smiling in that lean, toothy way he’d always had; he was a little broader set than once, but he still moved like a man who could leap over things. “I reckoned it had to be.”

The toast and beans that the woman in a black-striped dress, plastic apron and expression of intense ennui had served that morning had been disgusting. Bodie had pushed at the bag, wishing his appetite would come more easily.

“Do you remember?” Ray had asked. He still looked different, and also completely the same, which made Bodie’s breath catch and hurt in his chest.

Bodie had shaken his head.

“You told me yesterday, about this taste. You’ve been having the hospital food and you don’t like it much.”

“That wasn’t today?”

“No, at least, I don’t think so.”

“It’s still 2009? I haven’t...”

“It’s only been three weeks since the accident. It’s Wednesday.”

And then Bodie said: “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

“I know.”

Ray came closer and leant over him. “I know,” he said again, and something like a catch in his voice was even more evident.

His hair was completely grey now, and shorter. It looked like it might still have the same texture, the curls that caught at your fingers. His face had a few more lines, the teeth in his smile were straighter and whiter and his cheek...

“The old implant fractured.” Ray was smiling at little, watching Bodie’s expressions. “Amazing what they can do now. Fixed you up very well for one.”

“What happened to me?”

Ray’s eyes narrowed, and as he paused Bodie had a sudden conviction that he’d been coached, that someone had told him what to say if and when this question was asked. Not for the first time he felt anger, but not enough. He’d never been able to be angry enough with Ray.

“What do you remember?” Ray said at last, softly.

“Almost everything.” Two could play at that game.

“Bodie...”

“Help me up.” Bracing himself with his arms, Bodie forced his torso forwards and grunted, making his legs swing over the edge of the bed.

At once Ray was pushing him back, protesting. Bodie almost slapped him. “Help me up or watch me fall, I’m not just lying here playing the consumptive maiden.”

Ray stood straight, folding his arms.

Bodie stared right back. “If you don’t, I’ll just wait till you’ve gone.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Oh yes, that makes a huge amount of difference.”

“It does to me.”

Bodie had to take a few more breaths – the headache had come right back with movement. “So help me, then.”

Together they walked across the shiny yellow tiles to the window, and Bodie looked out at a slightly different view of the square of scrubby hospital garden, grey with winter and all the snow turned to slush. Ray’s hand was warm, grasping him under the elbow, supporting just enough.

Daylight. Bodie blinked. The world, out there, and somehow he’d been part of it.

He had to cough before he could speak; “So, why are you here?” He gripped the windowsill, fingers sliding over shiny white paint, and Ray let out a pained breath for him and tried to guide him back to the bed. Bodie didn’t let him, keeping his gaze fixed out at the bleak scene.

“Why are you here, Ray? Because unless I’ve forgotten a damn big chunk of something...”

He heard Ray’s sigh, and the smack of his lips, the way people did when they needed to start a sentence but didn’t want to speak it.

“I was there. Not when it happened, but after. I phoned you. I phoned you and you said it was OK to come – do you remember any of this? – To meet you in the café. And I’d just got through the door when I realised everyone inside was clustered in one corner, shouting and calling ambulances and I knew...” He drew a breath, and laughed a little at the end of it. “I knew at once it’d be you.”

Bodie watched a solitary blackbird perch uneasily on a bare branch. He felt suddenly very cold; his mouth was dry again. “What happened to me?”

“You were unconscious. They honestly won’t tell me anything. You don’t have a next of kin listed in your records, did you know that?” Ray’s voice was speeding up, nervous. “You needed someone to make decisions, only there wasn’t anyone and I couldn't do it, only keep telling the doctors that you’d fight, that you’d always fight and they asked me how well I knew you and I didn’t know what to say. And I keep wondering.” He drew a shaky breath and Bodie forced his eyes to stay on the blackbird as it swayed in the wind.

“I keep wondering if it was my fault. Contacting you out of the blue like I did.”

“I don’t remember. I don’t think I remember most of that week.” Bodie pushed him, trying to turn. “Help me back to bed then, if you insist on it.”

Once Bodie was safely sitting on the bed, Ray stepped away again. Bodie looked up at him; there was no clue in his appearance as to what he did now, or what kind of life he lead, other than that he was neatly turned out and his clothes were looked expensive, which was all Bodie might have expected anyway.

He was gathering a sentence when Ray’s phone rang.

“Isn’t that going to explode my machines or something?” he said instead.

Ray frowned, although whether at him or the phone Bodie wasn’t sure.

“Yes. Hello. Not now. Yes, I’m there. No. No, he’s fine. Yes. Look, I don’t need... I’m... Well you do that if it makes you happy but I’m not saying I’ll eat it. Yeah, sure, you believe that you’ll believe anything. I really have to go.”

Bodie pulled the covers over his legs.

Ray slid the phone away into his jacket and shrugged. “Sorry, that was my daughter. She thinks I’m not eating properly and wants to fill my fridge with microwave rubbish, which seems to be what she lives on.”

“Daughter?” Bodie raised an eyebrow.

“My youngest, Heather. She’s doing a year of work experience in the city before university. Then there’s Helen, she went to Australia when her mother did. She’ll be twenty-four now.” Anger passed briefly over his face and he stared into the distance for a moment before checking himself. “How about you?”

“Come on,Ray,” Bodie was really annoyed now. “If I had any then you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“Did you really not..?”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself mate.” He felt lost – so far in this whole crazy experience when Ray was around the floating feeling had diminished, but now it was worse than ever, like waking up in a lesson having missed all the reasoning and then being faced with a question.

But then that was right. That was how Ray had started to make him feel, all the time, towards the end.

\- - -

Bodie had been running, faster than he really could, pounding his feet down again and again, burn building in his muscles, legs getting heavy, pulse throbbing, lungs screaming and still running, still running as fast as will could take him, away.

And Ray had run after him, faster.

But then, of course, Ray hadn’t been carrying twelve pounds of explosive round his neck.

Ray chased him and chased death, and got one over on both of them, and that’s when, maybe, Bodie had begun to see. In the fading light on a misty airfield, another few too many bodies smashed on the tarmac, he’d felt the weary nausea that comes after adrenaline and leant in a little closer to Ray, to the warmth of Ray’s body under his jacket.

Later, they both still seemed to be shaking. Later, they’d buried themselves in the tangle of each other, fighting to submerge themselves in this growing thing that swelled too warm and necessary between them. It chased the horror away, and in the space left behind it felt like it was demanding more; hungry for definition that wasn’t just: not dead, not injured, not separate, not dead.

The easiest way to ignore that seemed to be to bury deeper, live even more in the moment, think even less.

And so Bodie had been coming apart, losing himself, pushed to pleasure so great he’d had to let go with everything from his mind to the curl of his toes, with only Ray to hold him up through it. Ray’s arms, warm and slippery with both their sweat, around him, pressure too deep to ignore.

Bodie had had lovers before, had good colleagues, good friends before and even had a few people who’d combined all those qualities, but this was something else. That was as far as he could describe it; something else.

New. Different. Better. Dangerous. Impossible.

Bodie had never before considered managing not to think deeply about his life to be a particular problem for him, but apparently the world was full of fucking surprises.

\- - -

For the next week the Physio came every day; Bodie was beginning to walk properly, starting light routines to help his lungs after so long lying on his back, and with the exercise he ate more and found the dizziness and disorientation to be decreasing. The same nurse came on a few times, and never referred to Ray again – he bristled at the idea that she was trying not to hurt his feelings.

The same square of garden was covered once more in snow, again in slush and then washed clear and more leaves blew into the empty plant pots. Bodie started watching the TV that came down on a mechanical arm above his bed and tried not to feel old. He’d been this way when he’d first attempted retirement, in the few months of boredom and listlessness he’d passed before having the sense to see that he had to be doing something and going back to CI5 for a training position. The younger recruits in the last five years or so had started calling him ‘the B-man’ and seemed bewildered by half of the experiences he drew on – more than one had asked him what a Communist was - but his classes had long had the highest attendance rate in the program and just sometimes there’d be one with the right kind of potential.

Sometimes there’d be people who shouldn’t have been there. Once or twice, he’d told them so.

“I had a friend in this game,” he’d said to a guy called Asim back in late 2007, after watching him carefully for a few weeks. “And he was damn good at it. From the police, same as you. But he really – underneath he really wanted the killing to stop, the fighting to stop and the world to be better. And to do this job you have to know that the killing never stops, and you just have to keep making sure it’s them, not us, doing the dying. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true, you have to know that.”

Asim hadn’t protested the implication, only raised an eyebrow. “All right, well what happened to him?”

“He left, but not...” Bodie shook his head, turning away to fiddle with his phone. “Not for that reason.”

“How then?” Asim’s eyes had been wide with simple curiosity, but also a streak of something else underneath that was even more reminiscent of Ray; an empathic ability to seek out weakness even without meaning to.

Bodie locked his phone again and shrugged, casually. “Oh, he got seen in public kissing another male agent – this was the early eighties, which was not a good time for that kind of thing – and they both basically got fired on technicalities.”

“Shit. That’s too bad.” Asim’s sympathy seemed genuine enough, but there was a question behind his eyes too – the guy was certainly good, too good to waste in a job he couldn’t live with.

Bodie kept talking, keeping the tone casual.

“He didn’t even like the guy they caught him with. Bastard called Gefferson – handsome and liked to hit people. Really liked to hit people. I always told myself that was why he chose Gefferson, just to get him kicked out too along the way – idealist, see?”

Asim had nodded and walked away, and within a month had left CI5. A year later Bodie had a letter from him – he was working as a war correspondent, already winning awards and fighting a desire to get involved in politics – thanking him enthusiastically for his advice:

_There’s this guy who does awareness for _War Child_ that I’m doing stuff with for this Panorama thing we’re hoping to get out next Autumn, and he thinks I should write a book about the mental effects of being paid to hurt other people and tie it in with the charity work and some of my own experiences, which would be just incredible and maybe also get some funding for that PTSD group that talked to us in training, do you remember? I was telling him about what you told me and he got really interested and asked for your number so I gave it to him – I hope that was OK? I’ll send you a copy of the book if it ever gets done! How come the more free time you organise the less there seems to be? _

At the recollection, Bodie frowned, wondering. But it wasn’t exactly important now, was it? He’d never answered Asim, just as he’d never called back a distant cousin who’d tracked him down, nor made much effort to see Cowley’s son, who’d appeared half from nowhere at the funeral and probably had some sort of story to tell someone.

He’d grown into solitude. It had been a habit long before he’d associated with Raymond Doyle and for all the years after; increasingly he regarded that interval as a blip, as something he never would have been suited to anyway.

Bodie shook himself, closing his eyes and refocusing on the room. Association of ideas was reminding him that it would be a good idea to phone in and give more directions for his classes. He started making notes on a corner of newspaper and, hearing the nurse open the door of his room, held out the charge card for the TV/phone, rooting for his wallet on the other side of the bed; “I’ll give you a quid in a minute.”

“Oh no, my hourly rate is at least a fiver,” Ray answered back.

Lifting his head, Bodie smiled before he could stop himself, and maybe only because Ray already was.

\- - -

There was another way it all could have gone. Ray was standing there now, unnecessarily rolling up his scarf, getting a familiar nod from the nurse who shortly did come in with medication, and Bodie found himself seeing for a split second that they could to her appear to be an old couple, the kind entrenched in each other’s habits and well-versed in the scripts of each other’s jokes, bickering and affectionate and accustomed and not speaking yet because they barely needed to, rather than because there was so little left that was safe to say.

There were so many other ways it could have gone. They could have, should have died, doing what they did. More than enough times, they almost had.

_What if we die tomorrow? _You could get so fucking far with that as a motivator. You could ignore what was sensible, ignore the changes you ought to be making or the conversations you ought to be having, because there wasn’t time, there wasn’t supposed to be time. Not tonight, let’s just be together tonight, let’s not talk about who you were or where you came from or what the fuck happened that makes you like this and hate that. Let’s not ask whether we’re in the right place in life, because come on, there’s probably not going to be enough life left to worry about.

And then Ray had been shot.

Bodie had run around, summoned by mixtures of terror, rage and duty between the hospital, the embassy and then the hospital again, back and forth. Finally collapsing - once the doctors said it was more than likely going to go well - somehow back at Ray’s flat, not sure how he’d got there, burying his face in Ray’s bed and crying like it wasn’t shameful, clawing up the sheets and gasping and aching with something much worse than happiness.

It brooded inside him a long time, and he might never had said it, only Ray chose some day, a few months later, to laugh – he wanted a chocolate bar and was justifying it to himself or some absolute bollocks like that – and say it: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”

He’d been bathed in sunlight, still moving awkwardly from the surgery, hair wet from showering and hands reaching for Bodie’s scalp, ready to massage his temples like he’d come to, after long days. It was something else. It was something Bodie knew, now, it was going to be more than he could do to live without.

The words rose: “Alright then, but what if we live? What if we live, Ray?”

Ray had blinked at him, tensing.

“What if we live? What if we don’t die and we keep living? We’ve got away with this so far - do you think that’ll last? What happens when your parents want to know? What happens when you stop wanting...” he made himself stop.

He’d got up and gone for the door. “I can’t exactly fucking marry you, can I?”

And then it went like bloody dominos. Bodie couldn’t remember who’d done what or said what or neglected to do whatever the hell would have fixed it – it seemed so absolutely obvious now, that nothing should have mattered. But they’d been so young - he’d never have said so at the time but he knew it now. They’d been young enough to think losing years didn’t matter.

A long time later, he’d come to think that Ray had thought Bodie was ashamed of him. But he’d not exactly been able to put a charitable spin on the Gefferson incident at the time; Ray had walked out of CI5 and out of Bodie’s life without an apparent backwards glance and Bodie had been alone, and in the end you could imagine what you liked but that was the way things had gone and nothing could ever change that.

\- - -

Once the nurse had left, Ray sat down and rolled up his scarf again, then looked up and bit his lip.

“So, this is harder than I thought it would be.”

Bodie raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry I’ve not been coming. My dog’s been sick.”

“Dog? Children and a dog? Please tell me you have a picket fence.”

Ray had the beginning of a smile. “A Dalmatian called Tracey. I had to get her or I’d have ended up talking to myself five years ago at least.” He gave a wry chuckle. “Anyway, she ate something out of a bin and I’ve had to stalk her with piles of newspaper ever since.”

“Nice.”

“I’ve gone through worse with you, I dare say...” Ray stopped, mid-grin and tented his fingers, drawing back on the chair. “Tell me, is this a good idea? Should I be here? I just... I haven’t really thought about it. And then a week stuck at home trying to take my mind off the smell of the poor dog and I started thinking I should never have even tried to contact you. Even if it wasn’t what made this all happen.”

“They still don’t know,” Bodie answered, quickly. “Apparently it could have been my heart, my brain, my electrolytes – anything could have made me fall and the head injury messed up most of what evidence might have been there. But they think I’m doing well. I might even be out soon.”

“You are a bugger for not answering questions, you know that?”

Bodie looked at him a while longer. “And you’re not telling me what you’re asking.”

Ray’s eyes still glinted that little bit when Bodie pushed it. “Who says I know? Sometimes I want to ask if you forgive me, sometimes I want to ask for an apology, sometimes I wish I’d never met you. Sometimes...” he shifted in his seat, “sometimes that I’d died when my heart was shot, and it had all been solved, because I’d never have had to...”

Bodie made a noise; couldn’t stop himself.

Ray looked up at him, and for one split second Bodie was so glad he couldn’t move quickly, because despite everything he knew, despite the years that had passed, despite the fact that life didn’t work out well like that, he would have kissed him, no doubt, otherwise.

“But we lived,” Ray continued, swallowing and starting to grin again. “We lived. And didn’t we make a fucking mess of it?”

The dizziness was coming back, just a little. Bodie sat up straighter on the pillows and began to feel his heart race. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

Ray flushed, just a little, and held out his hand. “I’m here.”

“Well, then...” Bodie had to stop speaking, just for a while, and just squeeze back tightly, and in one corner of his mind he wondered how soon he was going to be able to get up and go dancing.

\- - -

 


End file.
